AmithlonBlog

Just booted the system off the latest Kickstart 3.1.4 and Workbench 3.1.4.  Definitely a bit of effort involved but it works.

I replaced  the kickstart in smallird.gz with the A2000 3.1.4 Kickstart and installed WB 3.1.4 in WinUAE to give me the files for setting it up on a partition in Amithlon.  Compressing the new sys: partition to an .lha and then uncompressing that on a volume on my Amithlon I was able to boot off Kickstart 3.1.4 and Workbench 3.1.4.  I will continue to experiment with it and see how it compares with 3.9.  I have a lot to setup/configure still…..    

I had been running Lightwave 3d on my Amithlon system and doing a short quick image render was fine, anytime I tried to render an animation after a reboot my system would fail to boot properly and I’d have to format Sys:, and copy over my backup of sys: volume.  This was quite annoying and I kept looking for the cause thinking it was Amithlon related.

Nope…..Virus related.  After reading a thread on EAB about viruses and what was the best utility I decided to install it and check out my Amithlon system.  Yep…..the Lightwave3d files were infected.  Whenever I launched Lightwave it would start infecting my system.  Checked the backup I had (I have quite a few)  that would never copy over properly and discovered it was infected as well.  VirusZ cleaned it all and I now check every download before installing/executing 🙂

I  haven’t played with Lightwave3d since discovering this so I need to give it a run again and produce something on an “Amiga” in Lightwave.   I’ve just been playing so much with Lightwave 2015/2018 on the PC it will be a “releaning” experience.   Most of the models I’ve been playing with are too large to load in to LW 5 unfortunately.

If you aren’t scanning your Amiga/Amithlon system for viruses, you might want to start.

There are a limited number of supported graphics cards for Amithlon.  NVidia, Matrox, ATI and even Voodoo.  Some better than others, though it still revolves around older linux 2.4 framebuffer support.   Going through the kernel and gathering what we can find, this is the support breakdown for acceleration with each card type.  This is information based on kernel 4.

Current status is “work in progress” but we have patched Amithlon to remove the 4 MB limit on Matrox video cards.  Linux 2.4 Matrox framebuffer drivers had issues crossing a 4 MB barrier which results in Amithlon only seeing 4 MB on Matrox cards.  In testing with a  Two-headed 32 MB Matrox G550 PCI-e card, after the patch to Amithlon internal binaries we saw Matrox-1: at 16 MB and Matrox-2 at 4 MB.  This only works with Bernie’s new_emubox.gz kernel and Gary’s kernel 3.10.   Kernel 4 is incompatible with this mod and we are looking if any other incompatibilities are within Kernel 4.  With Kernel4 already requiring a switch from ram0 to ram1 in the init string, there may be some other issues undiscovered at this time.

Reading through the posts I noticed my system had changed slightly since the last time I posted, so a little updating…

System configuration:

Gigabyte Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L motherboard

Intel Core2Duo @ 4.00 Ghz (e8600 @ 3.33 GHz)

(2) 512 MB ram modules (1 GB total)

64 MB nVidia 5200 PCI graphics card

32 MB Matrox G550 PCIe graphics card

Catweasel MKIV PCI card

Soundblaster Live 5.1 PCI

Realtek 8169 10/100/1000 Network card (PCI)

Intel Pro-1000 10/100/1000 Desktop Network card (PCIe)

Motherboard 10/100/1000 Realtek  RTL8111 chipset

8x DVD-RW(-/+) Slot loading drive

20 GB SATA dos boot drive (freedos)

256 GB SATA AmigaOS drive

Multi-card USB reader

3.5″ PC Floppy (Catweasel allows for r/w of Amiga DD/HD and PC DD/HD disks)

Nothing spectacular but for those of you with the common RTL-8111 motherboard NIC (10/100/1000) this is a very nice addition.

Doing some linux investigating we’ve found a 2.4 kernel module for the RTL8111 series chips, common on motherboards (10/100/1000 nic).

I have a new module file for the following network chips  used on motherboards, it doesn’t build with the kernel so had to be manipulated a little to get it to ‘make’ for kernel4.

RTL8111B/RTL8168B/RTL8111/RTL8168
RTL8111C/RTL8111CP/RTL8111D(L)
RTL8168C/RTL8111DP/RTL8111E
RTL8168E/RTL8111F/RTL8411
RTL8111G/RTL8111GUS/RTL8411B(N)
RTL8118AS

I replaced the kickstart in Amithlon with a stock A500/A2000 3.1 kickstart.  The system booted just fine and runs with no issues that I’ve noticed so far.  It looks like only exec is different between the two.  I’m going to experiment with how much the shape.rom can be patched without creating any issues.

Okay, this is a much easier process to setup a compiling environment in Virtualbox to build the Amithlon kernel based off Milan’s Kernel 4 tree.

Compiling guide using Ubunto 5.10

I’m working on a new guide for compiling the kernel using an older Ubuntu distro, though it’s newer than the previous guide using a really old Centos distro.

It seems to be a quicker and easier setup as well and I hope to have it posted/hosted over the weekend.

This doesn’t add anything new though it does make the process easier and hopefully help some start rolling their own kernels.